It was eleven-forty on Saturday night, and Daniel Toomey had written the same sentence four times.

*God never gives us more than we can bear.*

He had crossed it out three times, and now it was there again in bigger letters. The kitchen table was covered in yellow legal pads and an open Bible whose spine was broken in so many places that it fell open wherever he wanted without his having to look: First Corinthians, James, and of course Job, which was where it always ended up when the subject was trials. He didn't need to read the verses. He had known them by heart since he was fourteen and sitting in another church, in another town, feeling something lift in his chest when the pastor raised his voice.

The work was in everything around the verses. In the margin, in red pen, was his real sermon: *Pause. Lower voice here. Eyes to the left side—the older ones. The car joke, let them finish laughing. Leave the pulpit here.* An arrow pointed to a passage halfway down the second page, and beside it he had written a single word and circled it twice: *TEARS.*

He knew where Margaret Olsen would say amen. He knew that Hector from the worship team would start playing softly on the keyboard when Daniel lowered his voice toward the end. Nobody had asked Hector to do that. He had been doing it for years, and it worked every time. He knew that the women in the third row would take each other's hands.

People thought a sermon came by itself, that the Spirit filled you and the words just poured out. Maybe it had been like that once.

He took the pad with him into the bathroom. The mirror there was small and spotted, and Kerry had been after him to replace it before she moved out. That was three years ago now. The congregation believed she was taking care of her mother in Tucson. He had never said so outright, only let them believe it until it became true for them, and every Christmas Margaret Olsen asked how Kerry's mother was doing and was told it was hard but the Lord was giving them strength.

He met his own eyes in the mirror and began.

"How many of you in here have ever asked God, 'Why me?'"

Pause. He let his gaze travel along the tile walls, row by row, and silently counted to three.

"Yeah. Me too."

That line was good.

He went through the whole sermon twice and timed the second run: thirty-two minutes. That was about right, long enough to feel like an event and short enough that the families with kids wouldn't start squirming. The part about Abraham wasn't working. He read it aloud to the mirror as written, *Abraham went out not knowing where he was going, and that, my friends, that is faith*, and it sounded like a greeting card, so he tried again without *my friends* and then with a pause before *faith* and then with his hands, he actually raised his hands there in the bathroom with the pad under his arm, and in the end he stood there saying *that is faith, that is faith* to himself until the word was just a sound and he could hear the neighbor's TV through the wall and felt stupid and cut the whole passage and swapped the order of two others.

Afterward he stood for a while in front of the man in the mirror. He was fifty-two, with hair that was still thick and going gray at the temples in a way people called distinguished, and eyes that people liked to meet. Behind him, on a hanger over the door, hung his suit, freshly pressed for tomorrow.

As he did every night, he tried to pray. He closed his eyes and formed the words silently, *Father, let my words be Your words tomorrow*, and waited. What came back was the hum of the refrigerator from the kitchen and a car going by outside. It wasn't even unpleasant anymore, more like calling a number you know has been disconnected, just to hear the tone, and after a while he went and brushed his teeth.

He went to bed and fell asleep almost at once.

---

The church was a former carpet store. If you stood in the parking lot in the right light, you could still make out the outline of the old letters above the entrance, paler patches in the beige of the facade where it had once said CARPET KINGDOM. Someone in the congregation had joked that they had traded one kingdom for another when they bought the place, and Daniel had made the joke his own and used it in his first sermon there. Now a lit sign above the door said GLEANING FIELD FELLOWSHIP in white letters, and under the name, smaller: *Pastor Daniel Toomey*.

He was there at seven. The sun was already on the asphalt, and it was going to be one of those heavy September days when the heat settled over the whole Los Angeles area and made the air above the freeway shimmer. He unlocked the doors and turned on the air conditioning and the lights in the sanctuary. He walked among the rows and straightened chairs that were already straight.

The sanctuary held two hundred and forty padded blue chairs in straight rows with an aisle down the middle. At the front was a low stage with a Plexiglas pulpit, so people could see all of him when he spoke, and behind the stage hung a cross of pale wood. An LED strip under the cross, which had been his idea, made it seem to glow.

Jesse, the quiet young man who ran sound, came first and started testing the mics. He had new glasses he didn't seem used to yet and kept pushing them up his nose between checks. Hector came with the worship team. After them came the deacons, then the coffee ladies, then the first families, and by nine-thirty the parking lot was nearly full and the lobby was buzzing with voices.

Daniel never showed his face in the lobby before the service. People would first see him when he stepped up onto the stage. He sat in his office with the door open and listened to the murmur. Sometimes he went out into the narrow hallway behind the stage and looked through the window in the side door out over the sanctuary, and that was where he saw the Sisk family come in.

Denise Sisk came in first, in a light blue suit he had seen many times before. She held her shoulders straight and her chin a little too high. Her makeup was careful, more careful than usual. Behind her came the two boys, around ten years old, hair freshly combed and shirts freshly ironed. They shoved each other until Denise turned around, and then they stopped short. Brent Sisk came after them, big and heavyset with a wide smile. He stopped at every other row to shake hands and clap shoulders, and something he said made two older women laugh.

Rachel came last.

She was seventeen or eighteen; Daniel wasn't sure which. She was Denise's daughter from an earlier marriage and had kept her father's last name, Moreno, and when anyone happened to say Sisk, Denise corrected them right away. Rachel wore her black hair in a messy ponytail and had on a gray cardigan even though it was going to be over ninety. She kept the sleeves pulled down over her hands.

They sat in the fourth row, where they always sat, close enough to be seen. Denise had once told him proudly that she hadn't missed a Sunday in five years, not even when the boys had chicken pox.

Daniel looked at Denise's makeup and at Rachel's cardigan and thought nothing of it. A year or more earlier, he had stood in the lobby with a question for Denise on the tip of his tongue: *How are things at home, really?* Then Brent had come over, shaken his hand, and said the sermon was the best he'd ever heard, and the question had dissolved. It had been the same fall that Brent paid for half the new sound system.

He turned away from the window and went to put on his jacket.

---

The worship set lasted twenty minutes, and he waited in the hallway listening to the sound rise and fall. Hector was good at this. He knew how to build a room: first something easy everybody knew, then slower and deeper, until people stood with their eyes closed and their hands in the air. When the last chord faded, the room was warm and ready, and Daniel stepped out.

He didn't walk fast. The congregation needed time to see him coming. Up on the stage he set his Bible and the pad down on the Plexiglas pulpit and looked out at them without a word while he counted to five in his head. The room went completely still. Someone in the back coughed and tried to muffle it.

The lift in his chest was the same as it had been when he was fourteen, and he had stopped asking himself where it came from. Two hundred faces were turned toward him, waiting.

"Good morning."

"Good morning!" The answer came from the whole room at once.

"How many of you in here have ever asked God, 'Why me?'"

He let the question hang. Hands began to go up here and there, hesitantly at first and then more, and he counted to three before raising his own.

"Yeah. Me too."

Soft, relieved laughter went through the room. In the second row Margaret Olsen nodded with her eyes closed.

The sermon moved the way it was supposed to. He told them about the time his car died on the freeway outside Victorville in the middle of August and he stood on the shoulder yelling at the sky, and they laughed in the right places, and he let them finish. He read the passage in James about counting it joy when you meet trials, since testing produces endurance and endurance makes you whole. Then he talked about gold refined in fire, and about Job, who lost everything and still didn't curse God.

When it was time, he left the pulpit and stood at the front edge of the stage, closer to them, with nothing between himself and the congregation. He lowered his voice.

"I know there are people here today carrying things nobody else sees."

Behind him Hector began to play, almost too softly to hear.

"Things you haven't told anyone, maybe not even yourselves. And you're thinking: I can't take any more. This is too heavy. I'm going to break."

Far in the back a child started screaming, loud and steady, right in the middle of the pause. There was nothing about that in the margin. Daniel smiled at the sound and said, before he had time to think, "Sounds like somebody agrees." The room laughed, relieved, while the mother carried the child out, and the laugh was better than the one he'd gotten for the car. He hadn't planned it. For a second he was happy. Then he glanced down at his notes and went on.

"But Paul writes to the church in Corinth, and he writes it to you too, today, in this place: God is faithful. He will not let you be tested beyond your strength."

Over on the left, among the older folks, eyes were shining. In the third row two women took each other's hands.

"He never gives you more than you can bear."

That was when he noticed Rachel.

The rest of the fourth row was turned toward him. Denise had her hands folded and her eyes wet and was nodding slowly. Brent had his arm along the back of his wife's chair and looked serious, and for once the boys were sitting still. But Rachel was looking at the row in front of her.

That was where the Petersens sat. Doug Petersen had his arm around his daughter Kayla, a girl Rachel's age with blond hair and a sweatshirt from the college where she'd just started. Kayla leaned her head on her father's shoulder without thinking about it, and Doug absently stroked her hair while he listened.

Rachel was staring at that hand. Daniel couldn't put a name to what he saw in her face. It reminded him of a child in front of a store window.

It bothered him, and for some reason he wanted to reach her more than anyone else in the room. He took half a step to the left, toward the fourth row, and let his voice drop lower and warmer.

"You, sitting there thinking this doesn't apply to you. That of all people, God has forgotten you."

Rachel looked up at him. Her eyes were dark and dry, and she was waiting.

He lost his train of thought.

It lasted one breath, barely that, and nobody else noticed anything. Hector kept playing and the room kept waiting while Daniel stood at the front edge of the stage and couldn't remember the next sentence. That hadn't happened to him in eleven years. Then he found it, and the words came on cue.

"He hasn't forgotten you. He has never forgotten you. He's just waiting for you to set down what you're carrying."

He turned away from the fourth row and spoke to the rest of the room. They followed him, and when he reached the circled word in the margin people were taking out tissues here and there. He prayed the closing prayer with his hands raised, and the congregation answered amen. While Hector moved into a closing song, Daniel left the stage through the side door so he could be at the exit before the first people came out.

In the hallway he stopped and leaned a hand against the wall while he caught his breath. His shirt was soaked through under his jacket. By the clock on the wall, he had preached for thirty-four minutes.

---

He stood in the lobby by the big glass door, with the sun at his back, and greeted each of them in turn. That was part of the job too, maybe the most important part, since at the door they got him one at a time. He remembered everybody's name.

"Margaret. Thanks for coming."

"Oh, Pastor." Margaret Olsen held his hand in both of hers. Her eyes were red. "That part about Job. Felt like you were talking right to me. Now that Walter's gone."

"That wasn't me talking, Margaret."

She patted his hand and left.

"Doug. Linda. And Kayla, how's college?"

Kayla smiled. "Good. Hard, but good."

"It's supposed to be hard. Otherwise it wouldn't be worth anything."

Doug laughed and slapped him on the shoulder. "Gonna remind myself of that when the tuition bill shows up."

And so it went. Hector got an extra pat on the back, and the two women from the third row wanted to tell him they had been praying for his sermon all week. One of the deacons' wives asked where the church had gotten the chairs, because her brother-in-law was opening a café in Fontana. A young man Daniel didn't recognize hung around a little too long and told him he hadn't been inside a church since he was a kid. Daniel held on to his hand and said *welcome back*, and could see it land. Only after the man had gone did Daniel realize he had never asked his name.

The Sisks were among the last out, and this time Brent led, hand out. His handshake was hard and dry, and he let go a little too late.

"Pastor. Best you've done in a long time. And I mean that. The best."

"Thanks, Brent. That's kind of you."

"Sound was great too." Brent winked. "Worth every penny, huh?"

"More than you know."

Brent laughed loudly and went on out into the sun with the boys behind him.

Denise took his hand carefully. She had put on her sunglasses even though they were indoors. "Thank you, Pastor." Her voice was hardly there. "I needed to hear that today."

He held her hand a second longer than the others'.

"See you at Bible study Wednesday, Denise?"

"We'll be there." She let go of his hand. "We're always there." She went after her husband.

Rachel was the last of them. She stopped in front of him with her hands out of sight, the cardigan sleeves pulled down over her fingers.

He smiled. "Rachel. Thanks for coming."

She looked at him the same way she had in the sanctuary.

"That go for everybody?"

"What do you mean?"

"What you said. How you never get more than you can handle. That's everybody? Every single person?"

The question was simple, and he'd heard it before in different forms, from the grieving and the sick, and from teenagers who wanted to be difficult.

"It goes for everybody. Everybody who turns to him."

"And the ones who can't?"

"Then he carries them."

Rachel didn't move. She nodded like someone who'd had a suspicion confirmed. Without hurrying she pushed her left sleeve up a little way, enough for him to see that her wrist was thin and pale and had a yellow-green band around it. She pulled the sleeve back down.

"Okay. Thanks, Pastor."

She walked through the glass door out into the heat, where Brent stood holding the car door open for her with a smile.

---

It was another fifteen minutes before the last of them left. The coffee ladies did the dishes while Jesse packed away the mics. Hector said it had been a wonderful service and that he'd be in touch about rehearsal Thursday. Somebody left a plate of cookies in the office. The deacons locked the offering in the safe after counting it and agreed it had been a good Sunday, better than the week before.

Then he was alone.

The sanctuary was quiet when he came back in, except for the hum of the air conditioning. Sunlight fell through the tall windows along one wall and lay in long yellow patches across the rows. The rows weren't straight anymore, because people had moved the chairs when they stood up and turned them toward each other when they talked afterward. On the floor lay bulletins and an empty water bottle, and under a chair in the seventh row, a child's sock, blue with white stars.

Nobody had asked him to straighten the chairs, and the cleaning crew would come Monday. He walked along the rows and pulled chair after chair back until they were as straight as they'd been at seven that morning. In the fourth row he stopped.

The chair where Rachel had sat was slightly crooked. He kept his hand on the back of it for a while before he set it straight. Two seats over was Brent's place, and he took it.

He hadn't sat among the congregation in years. From here the stage looked bigger and the Plexiglas pulpit nearly invisible. He loosened his tie. In his jacket pocket was a cookie from the plate in the office, wrapped in a napkin; he didn't remember taking it. It was dry, and he ate it anyway.

"Good sermon," he said out loud.

His voice bounced off the bare walls and came back hollow.

He thought about Rachel's wrist and the yellow-green band. Tomorrow would be Monday, and he wasn't going to call anyone.

He sat there a long time. Not until late afternoon did he get up and walk to the edge of the stage, to the same spot where he had stood when he had lowered his voice and the whole room had breathed with him. There, in front of the cross, he did what he had done after every service for eleven years and got down on his knees.

At first it had been in case someone came in, a deacon who had forgotten his keys or a coffee lady coming back for her purse. Whoever it was would see him there, alone before the cross, and understand what kind of man he was. Nobody had ever come.

His knees ached against the thin carpet, and he shifted his weight from one to the other.

He folded his hands and waited, without forming any words this time.

The air conditioning shut off with a click. The sunlight had moved and now lay across the stage and his hands. It got very quiet, and he had the notion that the quiet was listening.

Daniel Toomey stayed on his knees in front of the cross until the sun had gone down behind the freeway and the automatic lights in the parking lot came on, one by one.